by Kaleb Schad
Red, as if saying enough was enough, shrugged so that the pack slid over his head, then, somehow, slipped from the britching strap. He trotted down the trail after Syla, the snagged pack tumbling along for several yards, vomiting up all of Daveon’s supplies, before Red kicked it free.
He pulled his way up the cliff face and knelt in the trail breathing. Water coursed around his knees.
For several minutes he oscillated between screaming in frustration and screaming in joyful relief. He’d ridden these mountains his entire life and never had he experienced something like that. At least the only one to fall down the mountain had been him. He shuddered to think of Syla spilling over that edge or Red with a broken neck. Or maybe he shuddered from the fear.
You wanted adventure, this is what it looks like.
After his heart slowed, he stood and began gathering up what he could from his supplies. He wondered how far his horses would go before he found them?
20
Willis Aratoris weren’t no dummy. If that wall had changed directions that fast, what was to say it wouldn’t change directions again? And when it did, what was to say it wouldn’t make up its mind a whole hell of a lot faster this time around and pick up the pace? That’s why, even with the baron’s own word saying it was safe and all folk should stay in their homes and not be running off nowhere, Willis figured now was as good a time as any to go visit his brother up in Vinnis Grove.
Willis Aratoris weren’t no dummy.
That said, he wasn’t none too impressed with himself when Sir Nattic and his six soldiers came trotting up to him. Willis was finishing a half-hitch knot on the canvas covering his wagon. The rain was pissing like a horse on his head and he’d tried to get everything into the wagon as quickly as he could, but the tarp was already soaked and it was hard to get the knots tied tight. Willis’s wife, Brea and their two daughters were already sitting up on the bench, their two palomino’s harnessed in and ready to go, the buckles clinking as the horses shifted their weight.
“Ho, Good Willis,” the knight said. He turned his horse sideways in front of the harnessed palominos. Two of the soldiers came around behind Willis with the other four circling the back of the wagon.
“Ho, Sir Nattic,” Willis said. He stepped away from the wagon and wiped his hands on his pants. He didn’t know why he felt guilty. His ten-summer daughter, Minella, looked from Nattic to Willis. She held the family dog, Fintin, by the collar as he sat next to her.
“Market day isn’t even half over yet,” the knight said. “Taking things off, are ye?”
“Had enough of the market day,” Willis said. “Thought maybe of visiting my brother up in Vinnis Grove.”
“Vinnis Grove.”
“To visit my brother,” Willis said. He wiped his hands on his pants again. Why couldn’t he get them clean?
“Yer not a runnin’?”
“No sir.”
“Because our Lord Baron Blackhand, he assured us there ain’t no cause for running.”
“Yes sir.”
Fintin barked and Minella jerked on the collar and shushed him.
“What you bringing to your brother? Wagon is sitting heavy in the mud,” Nattic said.
“Just some odds and ends I promised him last time we visited.”
Nattic nodded and one of the soldiers drew his sword. Minella shrieked and Willis’s youngest daughter, Flora, started to cry. His wife bobbed the child on her lap, made shushing sounds. The soldier dragged the blade across the rope Willis had just finished tying and jerked back the tarp.
Inside was stacked everything of any value from the Aratoris household. Two walnut chairs that had been lathed and built by Willis himself, a chest with his mother’s jewels he had inherited after her death, a second chest with his wife’s dowry he’d received when they’d married, four golden goblets, a diamond necklace and ninety-four senits. Three year’s wage. Two more cedar chests filled with their clothes and some dyed fabric they’d picked up yesterday at market.
One of the knights let out a low whistle.
Nattic smiled at Willis. “Owe your brother all this? Must be some debt.”
“Not all of it, no.” Willis coughed. He couldn’t find his breath, as if a hand squeezed his lungs. “I guess…” What could he say? He worked his mouth and felt his brain stiffen with fear.
“We thought to maybe spend some time there,” his wife said. Bless Brea. She always had been the quick one.
“Vinnis Grove? This time of year?” Nattic said. He leaned out of his saddle and spat, then looked at Willis and said, “I wouldn’t, if I were you. Nothing but mosquitoes and horseflies up that way. And besides, our lord might worry people didn’t believe him. He might worry people were still going to sneak off anyway even though he promised them by the good word of Airim himself that his people have nothing to fear. You wouldn’t want him to think that, would you?”
Willis could feel the other soldiers behind him, could see out of the corner of his eye the soldier on the other side of the wagon still holding his drawn sword. So close to his wife and his two kids.
He nodded and closed his eyes. When he opened them again he waved for his wife and daughters to get out of the wagon. “Come on down, girls,” he said. “Maybe we should unpack some of this. Sir Nattic is right. Mosquitoes and horseflies this time of year.”
Willis Aratoris weren’t no dummy.
21
It took Daveon an hour before he caught up to his horses. Another twenty minutes back to his abandoned packsaddles, then a solid half hour of acrobatics to tie them together and get everything down into the gully at the bottom of the trail. Two full trips and he had his gear back in one place…sort of. It lay scattered all around the trail while Daveon sat on a rock and caught his breath, his legs shaking uncontrollably. Hunter’s Quakes, his old man called them, because they’d often come after taking an animal during a hunt. You ever don’t get ‘em, he’d say, that’s a sign you ain’t taking a killing seriously. Maybe Daveon hadn’t killed anything, but he’d damn near been killed and that seemed cause enough to get the shakes. Didn’t mean he’d tell anyone about this part of his trip, though.
The rain pressed so heavy and constant that it felt as if the sky itself were pushing him down. He couldn’t see more than twenty paces in any direction. A monotonous slapping of water on water.
With a little distance now to think about it, he was glad for one thing—being alone. Riding these mountains was dangerous in the sunlight. In a rainstorm like this, with as much mud and runoff as he was getting, he counted himself lucky to be alive and double lucky to have nobody witnessing his blundering.
The burn of it was how much time he’d lost. He wouldn’t reach the Evensons until late tonight now or possibly tomorrow morning. That put the others much later into the day tomorrow, maybe even two days out. He thought about the wall and was mildly surprised that it was his first time doing so all day. How close was it now? Was he truly in any danger or was it still far enough away that he would never see it? It was one thing for his family and his neighbors to think he was riding into danger. Another altogether to actually do it.
The sound started as a few small pops and a growling. Deeper than the rain. Angrier. Then another clap and another until it was a roaring crash.
Daveon leapt to his feet and scanned the rockface above him. He couldn’t see anything, but he knew the sound. Falling timber. And then he heard the whoosh of water and mud.
A mudslide screaming down the trail like Henley’s butcher slops in the ditch.
And he the idiot who parked himself, his horses and his gear at the bottom of that fucking ditch.
He looked at Syla and Red tied to a lodgepole pine, at his packsaddle and scattered bags laying in the grass. He sprinted for his horses.
A fir tree plummeted over the cliff and onto the trail he’d just been sitting at, its branches shattering in a deafening scream of violence. Syla reared her head. Daveon seized at the rope trying to release his half-hitch. Red
whinnied and bucked.
The surging stream swelled up his shins, mud slurping into his boots like hands.
The half-hitch came loose and Syla was free. He wrapped her rope around his wrist and started on Red’s.
Too fast now. Another tree, then four, crashed down on the trail above them. Trees that had stood taller than seven men and for longer than all their years combined, bowed, then surrendered to the landslide’s fury. Mud splattered into his face and rolling rocks pulverized his legs and his horses’ legs and he knew he was going to die. This would be it. He would die here with his horses and all he could think of was the look on Alysha’s face when he’d hurt Nikolai. Oh Nikolai. How could he have hurt his little boy like that?
His face was wet and he didn’t know if it was tears or mud or rain or if it even mattered.
Finally, Red’s tether came loose. He leaped into Syla’s saddle. She charged up out of the gully, not waiting for Daveon to spur her on. He leaned back against the reins. Too hard. Syla reared up, clawing at the sky with her front legs and he flopped backwards out of the saddle.
His head cracked against a rock. Muddy water whirled up his nose, down his throat. He coughed. Sucked for air.
Something brown and leather near him. A saddle. He picked it up.
His wits slowly swirled back into place just as the mud circled around the bend and then there was no time at all. Still holding Red’s lead rope, he catapulted onto Syla without using the stirrups, the packsaddle in his other hand and he put his heels to her. She didn’t need a second urging.
They shot up the opposite trail, uphill, climbing as fast as his magnificent beasts would lift him. The noise was everywhere now. Everything was water and screaming and snapping sounds.
When they had climbed for several long minutes he calmed enough to look behind him. The mudslide had hit the gully, then slid off down the cliff face. They were above the danger. He sucked at the air in long, hungry gulps.
Down there, in the valley where he had been sitting, where he had left his bags, there was nothing but surging clay and dead trees. He looked to his left hand, the hand holding the packsaddle and its two bags and realized this was all he had left.
In one hand he held his life entire.
“Aren’t you tired?” Isabell asked. “Domino could carry us both.”
The sun was just about to kiss the horizon and Anaz knew they were nearing his cabin. He shouldn’t think about kissing. With her so close and all.
“Do you know much of our language? You don’t speak and I can’t decide if it’s because you don’t have anything to say or don’t know how to say it.”
She hadn’t stopped asking Anaz questions all day. At first it had irritated him, all the wonderful silence he’d longed for and she insisted on filling it, but then he found himself kind of enjoying the sound of her voice. Years of talking to himself or to the stray critter, it kindled something inside of him to have a strange voice say things that he hadn’t expected. Anything. Even the most mundane of things, as long as they were surprisingly mundane.
“I can speak the common tongue.”
“I know,” she said. “You can’t be in the king’s army otherwise.”
“Has it been a common part of your life to hold onto wrong conclusions even when the truth has been lain before you?”
“See? You do know a lot of words!”
Anaz couldn’t help but laugh.
“I don’t care, you know,” she said. “I meant it last night. I don’t care if you’re running.”
“I’m not running.”
“I know it’s dangerous to say so, but I think people should be able to choose their own path in life.”
Anaz looked up at her. After the rain had stopped, she’d pushed back her hood and pulled her hair back in a ponytail and he thought she looked rather gorgeous. No. Stop. He railed against himself, towing against his body’s urges.
“I think,” he said, “We have found the first thing we agree on.”
“Oh no,” she said, “we agree on all sorts of things. Like how important it is to go to the wall together and find the Airim’s Lances.” She grinned and Anaz struggled, honest, he did, but couldn’t keep from smiling back.
Even the smell of the horse had somehow grown on Anaz, that pungent swirl of sweat and rain and horsehair. He noticed Isabell’s leg near him, the way the pants tugged around, revealing the muscular shape of her thigh, the firm slap of her scabbard against it. He forced himself to look ahead.
“It seems uncommon in your land that women should carry a blade,” he said.
“My father,” Isabell said. “If nobody expects a woman to swing a sword, then who better to train so she can stab when least expected?”
“Your father asks you to kill?”
“Not really. Luck favors the prepared, he would say. Keep a sharp sword and it’ll be there when you need it, kind of thing.”
“I knew a man like that,” Anaz said. “He was kind of like a father to me, as well.”
“Aren’t fathers great?”
Anaz hadn’t thought about his own father in many years, since his days with Hakkana, but the way she said it, the way she swept all fathers into a bucket filled with Hakkana and Baron Blackhand, he didn’t like it. He thought about his own father, standing over him, when the water miners had come. His dead face next to Anaz’s when Anaz had regained consciousness.
“My father was, yes,” Anaz said. “My true father.”
“There’s always the odd one out, I guess.”
Were they fighting? Anaz felt something brittle between them and couldn’t decide if it was a budding friendship cracking or an enmity forming.
“If you’re not a Yul Crafter, what are you? In all seriousness. I’ve never seen magic like that. You made no symbols and spoke no words.”
This was not what he wanted to talk about. He didn’t want to talk about anything, but certainly not this, yet he was scared to leave silence between them, echoing and smashing against their brittle bridge, so he said, “It is hsing-li.”
“Sing Lee,” she said.
It was actually quite close. Nobody in Abaleth had been able to get the breathy h in there either.
“Is that a god?”
“It is everything,” Anaz said. “It is what keeps you on the horse and the horse on the ground. It is what moves you to speak and to stay silent and to sing. It is tears and anger and cussing and poetry.”
“Now I kind of wish you knew less words,” Isabell said.
Anaz chuckled.
“You use it to fight? Your scars…My apologies. That was too forward.”
“It is okay.” Now that he’d given it a go, talking to her was filling him with something he hadn’t realized was missing. “I have used it to fight, yes, but it is not for fighting. It is for nothing. The hsing-li simply is and sometimes you can ask it to do things differently than it had intended to do them. If you are true, it will oblige.”
“I’m confused.”
“It is simple, but sometimes simple things are the hardest to understand. We expect complicated.”
They had finally reached the bottom of Arrowhead Peak and were about to climb Dome Mountain, names Isabell had taught him. Names are a kind of complication. For years, to Anaz, they were simply the tall mountain and the short mountain, but now he had names for them, handles grafted onto them, and that meant they were claimed by others. They weren’t mountains anymore. They were somebody’s mountains.
“I’m afraid,” Isabell said. It came out on a breath, as if it had sneaked out of her.
“Don’t go,” Anaz said. “Return to your home. Let things unfold as they may, as the hsing-li says they must.”
She was quiet and Anaz thought maybe she was considering his advice, but then she said, “Do you remember the woman that was sitting down the table from you at the Stop last night? The one with blond hair and that blue dress? She was there with her husband?”
Anaz did remember her, but he didn’t say so.
“Her name is Maya Willowheart. She has four daughters and one son, all grown now. They tried for years to have a boy and Airim kept giving her daughters and then finally, when she knew she was getting too old to have any more children, they had twin boys. Two! After all those years of praying, Airim had answered with two at once. One of them died from the Rot two years ago, but the other, he has four children of his own now. Her grandchildren. Her other daughters also have children. All told I think she said she has fourteen grandchildren. They all live there, Anaz. In Fisher Pass.”
Somewhere a coyote barked and then yowled and Anaz and Isabell listened as his pack mates picked up the call, a chorus of wild.
“If your hsing-li is telling you to let them be devoured by creatures that shouldn’t even exist, shouldn’t even be allowed to live, then your hsing-li is a dark force in this world and you should dread answering to it.”
The road narrowed to two ruts in a trail cut by wagon wheels. Anaz stared at them as they walked and he thought about what she had said and he thought—worried?—that he and her might be like those two ruts in the road. Going in the same direction, yet never coming together.
22
“Right you are men, she can’t be far!” Nattic charged among his soldiers like a father teaching his sons to play Kiggle Knocks.
The very fucking men who let her get away in the first place, Marcen Blackhand thought. He stood on the steps to the hall watching the piss poor procedure unfolding in his inner bailey. Less than a third of the men had finished armoring themselves and climbed their mounts.
“There now, the bevor goes over the breastplate.” Nattic repositioned a young man’s armor, snapping the piece into place.
Any man who can’t buckle his own neckpiece deserves to be stabbed in the throat. It was his own fault, he knew. Not the men’s lack of training in their armor. Well, yes, that too, but he meant Isabell. Her escaping. He should have known. He should have seen it in her eyes after they’d returned from the inn. He’d held back when beating her, but only barely, had left enough marks on the outside to be sure there’d be some on the inside. Marks she’d remember, think about next time she wanted to disobey him. Reckon she’d thought about them alright. Thought they weren’t that bad after all.
